Duyen Nguyen had never thought about her favorite word in the English language.

“My favorite word?” she asked shyly, wheels visibly turning in her head as she scrambled through her rapidly expanding vocabulary.

“Lucky.”

When she says the word — her lilting voice rising in both tone and pitch as she pronounces each syllable — you can almost feel the relief spilling out.

Nguyen, a 17-year-old foreign exchange student from Vietnam, chose the word less than 72 hours after undergoing open heart surgery at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan. The surgery was required to repair an atrial septal defect — a hole between the upper chambers in the heart — that was discovered when Nguyen wanted to play sports at Mancelona High School.

“I wanted to be on the cross country team at school,” Nguyen said.

“I play basketball in Vietnam in my physical education class and here I wanted to run cross country because my friend who is very friendly was running cross country.”

Jody Garchow has raised seven children and is no stranger to the requirements for high school athletics. Nguyen’s host mother took her to the Ironman clinic in Mancelona - located in Upper Michigan's Antrim County, north of Kalkaska - to have what the believed would be a routine sports physical.

“The nurse got to listen to her heart and said she had a pretty good heart murmur and she can’t pass her for a physical,” Garchow said. “So she sent us to a clinic going on two days later in Petosky.”

The murmur detected by the nurse turned out to be a symptom of ASD, a defect that had caused Nguyen’s heart to beat abnormally since birth.

“In the short term, the kids with an atrial septal defect tend to have less exercise tolerance and can have increased respiratory infections,” said Dr. Richard Ohye, the surgeon who operated on Nguyen.

“In the longer term meaning young adulthood into adulthood they begin to have right heart dilatation because of a volume phenomenon of having extra blood there.”

If the hole is not repaired, the dilation, or growth, of the right side of the heart can lead to increased complications including heart rhythm problems, right-heart failure and lung hypertension.

Luckily for Nguyen, her host family was located in a state with a world-class pediatric hospital. Yet CCI Greenheart, the foreign exchange program that brought her to the U.S, did not want her to utilize the services available.

“Two days after they found the hole, I called CCI [Greenheart] about the insurance plan she had as part of the program,” Garchow said. “They sent her mother a letter saying she had to go home and they were dropping her off the program. So that was a big hassle.”

Nguyen said that she paid about $12,000 before leaving Vietnam to be put on an insurance program that they told her would “cover everything she would need,” while she was in America. Garchow said that the program had refunded part of the fee.

“They promised that things would be taken care of when she came here, that if she had a problem they would help her,” Garchow said. “And the very first problem the answer they had was she’s got to go home.”

When Garchow lodged a complaint with the State Department, it was determined that CCI could drop Nguyen from their program once she applied for an F-1 visa that would allow her to continue studying. Garchow said that Nguyen is currently “in between visas” and that she is no longer part of CCI’s program.

The change in visas means that once Nguyen returns to Mancelona, she will have to pay to attend high school, costs that could come out to more than $10,000 for her one remaining semester.

Repeated calls to CCI Greenheart seeking comment were not returned.

Nguyen came to the United States with little knowledge of the country and even less knowledge of Michigan or the small town of Mancelona.

“I had dreamed about America and read about it, but I didn’t really know much about Michigan,” she said. “Halom City where I’m from has lots of buildings and is very busy. It has a lot of cars and motor-bikes in the roads. Mancelona is very quiet, but I like it.”

Garchow said it would have been difficult to give Nguyen any more of a culture shock, but that she has adapted very well to life in small-town America.

“Except that she doesn’t like snow very much,” she said. “This winter was the first time she’s ever seen snow, and she really liked it the first time she saw it but now it’s really not her favorite thing.”

When it became clear that Nguyen had a major heart issue, her mother Thuy Nguyen was contacted immediately.

“I was worried that everything was going wrong. I was surprised and worried and scared when I heard about the heart problem,” Thuy Nguyen said, with her daughter acting as interpreter. “But when I heard about the surgery I was very happy.”

Against her daughter’s wishes, but with her daughter’s help, Thuy Nguyen set out on a 36-hour trip that included an 11-hour layover in Japan and ended in Traverse City about one week before Duyen’s scheduled surgery.

“I didn’t want my mom to come [for the surgery], because it’s a long ride and after my grandfather died she’s had her own health issues,” Duyen Nguyen said. “But she came anyway and now I’m happy she’s here.”

As she prepared to leave for Ann Arbor for her operation, Nguyen’s friends in Mancelona rallied around her. The basketball team that she would have joined if her heart allowed held a bake-sale fundraiser for her, and honored her at their first home game after her return home.

“My friends asked me every day about my heart and how everything is with me,” Nguyen said. “Before the surgery they said good luck and made me a big poster that everyone signed. They also gave me some presents, some candy and other things.”

Ohye, the head of pediatric cardiac surgery at Mott Children’s Hospital, performed the surgery December 13, less than three months after the murmur was first detected.

“She actually had a very large ASD, virtually the entire wall [between her right and left atria] was absent,” he said.

“We reconstructed it with a patch of gortex, which is a similar material to what’s in rain coats and ski gear and stuff like that, jut a lot thicker. It’s a very tough material, it’s inert, and she will be able to cover it with her own tissue, so her body should eventually feel like it’s not even there.”

By December 15, Nguyen was already up and moving around with little pain, surprising both her biological and host mothers with her resilience.

“I can feel my heart now that it’s normal,” she said, holding her hand over her chest. “But now it’s not normal for me.”

Garchow explained that Nguyen was so used to her heart beating and a quick and uneven pace that the slow steady rhythm felt out of place and strange.

The doctors have told Duyen that she has to wait five weeks before running again. Once she is cleared, she plans to get right back into athletics.

Nguyen is hesitant to discuss her future plans after the setbacks she’s experienced during the school year, but she intimated that they include going to a university in America.

“She had been looking at the University of Chicago pretty closely, but now I think the University of Michigan has definitely caught her eye,” Garchow said.

“Everything is down and then happy and down and happy, it’s been crazy,” she said, making roller coaster motions with her hands. “I just want to say thank you to the hospital and my host family and my friends and everyone else.”

Approaching the end of a particularly steep section of the ride, Nguyen is healthier than she’s ever been. All it took was a lot of help from family, friends and strangers — and perhaps just little bit of luck.